582
PAR TIS
AN REV lEW
The sons are militantly atheistical. Edmund's favorite author is
Nietzsche, whom he quotes: "'God is dead: of His pity for man
hath God died.''' The blasphemous reaction is not emphasized in
Long Day's Journey,
but it is in
Moon for the Misbegotten
where
Jamie Tyrone, now in his early forties, plays a leading role. Here he
tells of his blasphemous conduct after his mother's death. He had
been abstemious for two years, but on the news of his mother's death
an intolerable desire for desecration overcame him. He gets drunk,
almost breaks out into a diatribe at the wake, and when escorting
the coffin, in the baggage car of the train, to the East from Los
Angeles, he continues his drinking and has a nightly assignation with
a fat, blonde, fifty-dollar whore. In his drunken revels with the
blonde he sings the last two lines of a "tear-jerker" song that he knew
as .a child:
And the baby's cries can't waken her
In the baggage car ahead.
The idea of betrayal, the "turncoat" psychology, permeates all
the Tyrones. Everybody has betrayed everybody else. The father be–
trayed the mother because of his stinginess: when she was in pain
once, he hired a cheap doctor, who unscrupulously started her on
morphine; and the father will also probably betray Edmund by send–
ing him to a cheap sanatorium. The mother betrayed Edmund just
by bearing him, by bringing him into
his
painful existence. J arnie,
in effect, had killed the son Eugene, who died in infancy, after hav–
ing been visited by the contagious Jamie (who had been told to stay
away). Edmund and Jamie fail their parents by their wasted lives,
and Jamie betrays Edmund by trying to corrupt him. (They
all
are always honest enough to admit all these enormities.) The mother
betrays them all by beginning to take dope on the day of the "long
journey." Culturally, psychologically, they "know" that nobody is
to be depended upon, father, mother, sibling. Whatever the weak–
ness is, it will be given in to. The dope addict mother can't be cured
-they all know this, and expect it. In fact, they would be disap–
pointed in a deep, obscure sense if she broke off, and they were all
to be happy and secure. They don't expect to be happy, for life is
not like that. Always there is the fierce, primitive suspicion that no
one is to be trusted. The promises to the parents and the relatives,
the "pledge" to the priest, the "bargain" with God, about "the
